In The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan brings Degas’ art to life

A few minutes after Cathy Marie Buchanan leaves the west-end Toronto coffee shop where she was discussing her new novel, a young woman approaches my table. “I totally eavesdropped on your conversation,” she says, and proceeds to explain how she read a review of the novel earlier in the week. She’d been planning on buying a copy of the book this very day, she says, but had forgotten the title.

“The Painted Girls,” I offer.

“I already wrote it down,” she says.

The Painted Girls is one of the most anticipated books of the season, not only in Canada but in the United States, where it is Riverhead Books’ lead spring title. It has already garnered enthusiastic reviews in Canada’s two national newspapers, as well as notices in Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today and a full-page rave in People. Buchanan seems slightly bewildered by her good fortune. The 49-year-old came to writing later in life (“I took Grade 13 English only because I had to”) and for a long time was hesitant to call herself a writer. She earned a BSc in biochemistry and an MBA and worked for IBM before her first novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, a historical drama set in her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont., was published in 2009.

The human heart is a mystery, but in late 19th-century Paris, the setting of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel The Painted Girls, a few intellectuals believe they are making progress in unveiling it. An Italian criminologist named Cesare Lambroso has discovered the key to spotting criminals, for example, by measuring their facial characteristics. Criminals, it turns out, have a “forward thrust of the lower face; broad cheekbones; a low, sloping forehead; and dark, abundant hair.”

Émile Zola, meanwhile, uses the novel as a scientific experiment to trace the twin influences of heredity and social milieu on his characters, who are hopeless victims of those two influences. In his novel, L’Assommoir, for example, he tells the story of Gervaise, a washerwoman who is determined to maintain her home and family. Better she should read scientific literature which would tell her that she is doomed to end up as a drunkard on the streets, which is in fact what happens.

It was in Niagara Falls where she first studied ballet. For almost a decade, until she was an undergrad at the University of Western Ontario, she was a student at the Feder School of Classical Ballet, housed in the basement of an old bank on the U.S. side of the river. Tacked onto the studio’s walls were prints of the work of Edgar Degas, whose brush captured the petit rats of the Paris Ballet in the last years on the 19th century.

“I wouldn’t say I always wanted to write about dance, but I think it was a really natural place for me to go,” she says.

When she was nearly finished writing The Day the Falls Stood Still, Buchanan saw a BBC documentary about the girl behind Degas’ famed sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. “It really sort of flew in the face of my notions about what ballet was all about,” she says of the doc. The girl’s name was Marie van Goethem, and she was a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. Buchanan had found the subject of her next novel.

“I spent a lot of time looking at that sculpture,” she says. “And this is what I tend to do when I’m looking at photos: I start to imagine lives for these people. I’m a bit crazy that way.”

The novel begins in 1878, when Marie is 13. She lives with her two sisters and their mother, an oft-drunk laundress, in a cramped Paris apartment. Her father recently died, yet the landlord shows the family little mercy: if they don’t pay the rent, they’ll be out on the street. Marie and Charlotte, her younger sister, try out for the Opera’s dance school, whose students earn 70 francs a month, enough to pay the rent. There, Marie has ample opportunities to earn extra income; she meets Degas, who invites her into his studio to model, and Monsieur Lefebvre, who offers to become Marie’s “abonné,” men who sponsored the dancers and sometimes expected a little extra for their patronage.

Degas himself is only a spectral presence in the novel; even when he is on the page, he is often hidden behind his easel

Degas himself is only a spectral presence in the novel; even when he is on the page, he is often hidden behind his easel. He comes across as a quiet, odd man — some of Marie’s fellow students hint at sexual transgressions, but nothing is ever made explicit. While his sculpture of Marie was praised when it was unveiled in 1881, her appearance was roundly criticized as not only ugly but somehow criminal; it didn’t help that Degas exhibited the wax sculpture alongside his painting Criminal Physiognomies, the subjects of which were two young men on trial for murder.

“This was not a kind portrait of Marie van Goethem that he came up with, and he must have known that the critical reaction would be at least, in part, one of revulsion,” Buchanan says. “By and large, [the reviews] were about her being ugly, and that you could tell that she was going to come to no good. It was extremely negative. I have to believe it must have been a blow to her.”

How this would have affected Marie is only one part of The Painted Girls, which seeks to humanize the girl behind the sculpture. Buchanan wanted to write a book that presented “a possibility for her life, not some abstracted version.” In a way she’s done exactly what Degas did more than a century ago: taken a life and turned it into a sculpture, only from words instead of wax.

“I like that idea,” she says. “I feel like I’ve created a more kind portrait of Marie van Goethem than Degas did.”

But The Painted Girls is as much the story of Marie’s older sister, Antoinette; her downfall mirrors Marie’s ascendancy through the ranks of the Paris Opera. Antoinette, a failed dancer herself, falls for a young Parisian hoodlum named Émile Abadie, one of the subject’s of the aforementioned Criminal Physiognomies, though there is no historical evidence they ever crossed paths.

‘My sister Nancy and I used to roll around on the floor, punching each other and hitting each other with a wire brush’

“When I started writing the book I really thought that I was going to tell Marie van Goethem’s story,” Buchanan says. “I didn’t know that Antoinette would take on as large of a role as she did.

“I have three sisters that I love dearly, despite some really alarming teenage rows,” she continues. “My sister Nancy and I used to roll around on the floor, punching each other and hitting each other with a wire brush. And yet we were each other’s maids of honour, we’re guardians of each other’s children, she’s my best friend in the world. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time pondering the mysteries of sisterhood, both the rivalries and the love, and of course they found their way onto the page. Antoinette started demanding equal time, and I think it was almost inevitable that that was going to happen. That this book would end up, ultimately, being about sisterhood.”

As for what happened to the sisters, not much is known. Marie left the ballet, and an article Buchanan uncovered suggests she started hanging out with the wrong crowd, but other than that the family disappeared from history. Only Charlotte, who went on to a successful career as a dancer and teacher, enjoyed what might be called a happy ending.

Not long ago, Buchanan visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whose collection includes one of 28 bronze reproductions of Little Dancer cast after Degas’ death in 1917. The museum also has a self-portrait of the artist.

“I felt the weight of the world when I looked at it,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Did I get him right? Was I fair and just?’ ” she says with a laugh. “I wonder if he had those feelings when he looked at Marie?”

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan is published by HarperCollins Canada ($22.99).